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Martin Dempsey is the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the U.S. military. I first meet General Dempsey when we co-taught a course on global leadership at Duke, I have since interviewed him a couple of times. To get to the pinnacle of the U.S. military you must prove yourself a leader at each promotion along the way. This is a leader very much worth listening to. In this excerpt of an hour long interview, the General reflects on how an executive keeps in touch with reality when there are so many layers between you and the pointy end of the organization.

KM – Between the front line troop and yourself, there’s many levels of filters. How do you sniff out reality with all those filters getting between you and truth?

GMD – Man – boy – that’s really hard. When I pinned on my fourth star in December of 08, I had a four-star coming through the receiving line to congratulate me and he leaned over and he whispered, “You realize that, from this point forward, no one will ever tell you the truth again.” You know, he said it tongue in cheek, but I took the caution to heart. You know, people generally want to tell you what’s going well in their lives – and, by the way, looking back, you often wish you hadn’t . If you’re lucky, you might see the Chief of Staff of the army or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs once in your life. – When you see that person, you don’t want to unload your rucksack of problems; generally speaking, you want to tell them what seems to be going well with the odd, “I can use some help in this regard.” . – When you are only seeing people once it’s really hard, I mean, really hard, to figure out what’s going on at the lowest tactical edge; where that young soldier’s at – there, by himself, on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

I think it’s the reason I travel; it’s the reason I engage. I’ll give you one vignette – and I have many –about my Facebook page that was really important to me - and made me feel very good about it. We’ve had some challenges with traumatic brain injury– identifying it, understanding it, treating it and preventing it – and so, every once in a while, on Facebook, just to get some feedback, I’ll post a question. I’ll say, “Hey look, we’re trying to figure out what we can do at this level to help you – at that level – to deal with traumatic brain injury. Anybody got any idea?” And, I’ll tell you, I’ll get 100,000 hits on a question like that. I published my reading list last week and got 250,000 hits in the first six hours – people downloading my professional reading list.

So, engaging directly is really powerful. And again, I’m not trying to undermine the chain of command between me and them and I never do. Every once in a while, someone will be critical about a leader somewhere along the line and there’s other mechanisms for dealing with that.

But in this vignette, this soldier said to me, “Sir. I had a problem. I was within a hundred feet of a blast and my chain of command notified my spouse and she got all upset and worried about me and I had decided I wouldn’t tell her because I was far enough away that I wasn’t affected by it and my brigade surgeon told my spouse. And now I have this huge problem. My wife thinks I’m being disingenuous with her and so forth.”

He said, “I think it was a violation of the policy.” Frankly, I had no idea what the policy was, I know a lot about policy but I don’t know what that particular policy was at that level. It turns out that we had in fact put a policy in place to try to help us help them that said if you were within 50 meters – or 50 feet, I guess – of a blast, that you had to be examined by a doctor – kind of, the same way you examine a potential concussion on a football field. The policy also noted that, if you were within 50 feet, we would want to inform your next of kin, just as we would if you were wounded, but we needed your permission to do it.

Some well-meaning brigade surgeon major said, “Well, if 50 feet is good to test these kids, maybe 100 feet’s even better and I think we should tell the families one way or the other because we’ll be helping them”.

And so, in this one brigade – which is thirty five hundred people out of, right now, 100,000 deployed –if you were within 100 feet, you were going to get pulled from the line, you were going to get examined and they were going to tell your next of kin. We had to row back in; I had to go back through the chain of command and say, “Look, you can’t, kind of, independently raise the standard here. We’ve got the standard in place for a reason.”

So, there’s a case where, at the lowest edge, I was able to see something that, otherwise, I never would have been able to see and, kind of, flipped it almost immediately. But again, you have to be careful with that kind of power because I could become the big squad leader in Washington and I don’t want to do that.

Postscript: When I was young employee at IBM back in the early 1980s I did the first study for IBM Canada of the PC marketplace. By the time the day had arrived to present to the President of IBM Canada all the five managers between him and I had reviewed it and each had removed at least one or two points from my presentation. At the end of my presentation the President stood up and said, “Let’s go sing Christmas Carols in the Atrium” (this is back when we did things like that!). So he put his arm around me and we made our way down to the Atrium. As we walked he probed me about what I had found but did not say in the scrubbed presentation he had just heard. As a wise executive he knew there were filters between him and reality, in this case his IBM managers. I recall looking back and seeing the look of horror on their faces as they realized that I was so young I would tell him what I really thought and most likely slay a few of their sacred cows. Sounds like have not changed all that much!